Pablo Chávez

Owner of Tacos Chávez

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Pablo Chávez was born in El Capricho near La Piedad, Michoacán, Mexico. After the second grade, he began to work in the fields, entering the United States in 1961 to work as a bracero. He later moved to Napa in 1966 and worked for a waste management company. Selling tacos was initially a hobby he began in 1972. On Sundays, he would pass out free tacos at soccer games for tips. He later sustained a back injury, and could no longer work as a garbage man, so Chávez turned to selling tacos full time, six nights a week, to support his family. Selling tacos was lighter work and gave his back time to recover. Several years later, he was able to return to full-time work in the vineyards at Beringer for another twenty-five years. Still he continued his night time taco sales as he had a “pretty big following,” his daughter Gliselle shares. “He is ‘muy trabajador” – a very hard worker.

Chávez’s food service model is unique in that he sells only one kind of taco, made from beef and cabeza (head), onions, a lemon wedge, cilantro and his wife Leonor’s own hot sauce. Tacos Chávez appears to have been the first taco truck in Napa; it was initially a 1951 RV that Chávez customized to meet his kitchen needs and allow him to sell tacos out of a window. When other taco trucks later came on the scene, people warned him he would lose business because of the competition, but Tacos Chávez continued to grow.

Chávez advises people starting a new business to expect highs and lows. Sometimes you make only $20 and sometimes you sell out all of the food you made. “You have to be consistent, not only the quality of your work but also the way you do business, the way you treat people, and the customers will keep coming back.” Clearly, his business model is working!

A funny story he recalls is visiting his hometown and staring at a big, white, modern, taco truck–wishing that he had one himself–for such a long time that the truck’s operators assumed he was staring because he was poor and hungry, so they gave him some tacos. Later, after his 1951 camper could no longer pass county inspections, Chávez finally bought himself a big, new, white taco truck, and it was one of his proudest moments ever.

One of the biggest challenges he faced initially was being refused a business permit, until Jess Romero Sr. advocated on his behalf to local elected officials–and then his first permit was granted. Chávez would like to ask people to be considerate of the small business owners like him whose business requires personal sacrifices because it’s for the good of the community and for the customers that he does his work.